Description
The base is solid concrete, 50 ft (15.2 m) square by 10 ft (3.0 m) thick, resting on bed rock 31 ft (9.4 m) below ground. Joyce of Whitchurch built the clock, the face of which is 5.25 m (17.2 ft) across, the largest bell weighs 13,619 pounds (6,177.5 kg) with all the bells weighing 20 tons (18,150 kg); the minute hand is 4.1 m (13.5 ft) long, the hour hand is 2 ft (61 cm) across, the pendulum is 15 ft (4.6 m) long. The clock hands are made out of sheet copper. There are ten floors served by an electrical lift in the SW corner (Cheesewright, 1975, p. 57). The tower was built from the inside, without scaffolding, up to the level of the balcony. It is built of Red Accrington brick with Darley Dale dressings and tapers from 29 ft (8.8 m) square to 23 ft (7.0 m) below the balcony (Braithwaite, 1987, p. 4). Due to it being built from the inside it was not pointed and had to be pointed in 1914 and was subsequently repointed in 1957 and 1984-5. Its weight, solid brick corners linked by four courses of brick resists the overturning wind forces.
Carved in stone round the tower are the words:
This tower commemorates the founding of the university through the initiative and active encouragement of its first chancellor the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain
Old Joe is also similar to St Mark's Campanile in Venice, the latter serving as the inspiration for Sather Tower at University of California, Berkeley. David Lodge's novel Changing Places tells the story of exchange of professors between the universities of Rummidge and Euphoric State, Plotinus (thinly disguised fictional versions of Birmingham and Berkeley), which in the book both have replicas of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on campus.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower
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“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
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